Annuals VI

The top picture shows Annuals VI off the loom. It is 21 inches long as shown.  The picture below shows the woven fabric after the machine embroidery of grasses and seed heads has been added to Autumn and the flowers have been sewn on to Summer with metallic gold thread.

This shows the whole thing assembled on its five inch perspex cube. The viewpoint is looking at Summer and Autumn.

This one shows Spring and Summer.  And that is the end of the Annuals series.I have started on the Fruit and, after some trials, have finished a square of apples. I have painted the warp for pears and will complete that tonight.

I have also worked out what to do about the triple cloth for the enamels. I have decided to do it in 12/2s cotton and have ordered some from Halls.

This last weekend we had Priscilla Lowry  at the Kennet Valley Guild to give a talk (The WoW Factor) and two courses (One on Knitting Silk and one on Spinning Silk. The talk was very interesting - what does a juror look for at a juried exhibition. Something different, something that stands out. Something that has been designed. Definitely food for thought there. She is a first rate teacher and one very knowledgeable lady .

Last Thursday Michael and I squeezed in a visit to an Exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham dealing with Art Materials. We had booked for a half day course on pastels with Tim Fisher and that was very informative. I learnt such a lot. We were used a paper new to me - basically high class sandpaper!!! Not something where you blend with your fingers.

Vale of Evesham IV

This is Vale of Evesham IV with various improvements. Although it cannot be seen in this photo, I have got the transitions between sides better. Mostly by running the same colour over the join.

Winter and Spring
This is much as before but the edge is better. I have dyed another lot of flowers so I have three shades of pink and the original off-white. The cordons and their branches are woven in several shades of brown and green now.

Spring and Summer
In this, I continued with the pale green weft round the corner and up to the trunk of the first cordon.

Summer and Autumn
You can see the pale green weft from Spring on the extreme left. On the right of Summer (leaves), there are small paler purple plums (the unripe plums suggested by Linda Scurr- thank you, Linda) which have been embroidered on. Autumn with plums all over is not changed.

I feel I have exhausted this vein. No doubt, I could do another one and it might be better executed and maybe I will have an inspiration for improvement. So I will wait and see.

But I had a very good thought for improving the Annuals. I have woven a single side to try it out and it was satisfactory as Nero Wolfe would say. I have also dyed more material for flowers. So I must awa' to the Megado to do a wee bit o' weaving.

Which reminds me of when I worked at Aberdeen University Physics Dept. A typical remark at coffee would be 'Well, I must awa' and do a few wee summies'.  Said wee summies would usually take a week or two and fill a lot of paper. I could never quite get used to that.

A New Project

Last week was taken up with three lengthy visits to Worcester Royal Infirmary and two to our local GP. Lots of waiting time which can be used to think. I had an idea!! My husband has done some classes in enamelling and we have a number of his samples on square copper plates about 10 cm square.  I have been thinking about these for two years. Must be something I can do with them. My idea was triggered by a picture in Val Holmes' book on Machine Embroidery which I borrowed from my sister though I see it has my niece's name, Cally Booker, written on the flyleaf. I wonder if she knows I have it. I was reading this book while husband was having an MRI scan. Val Holmes showed some embroidery which was attached to squares of raku-fired tiles  with holes in them to which the cloth could be sewn.  Val Holmes attached her tiles together using metal wire. They were probably quite heavy. The enamelled tiles are also quite heavy. My thought was some form of double or multiple weave.
 

 
Some years ago, three of us did an entry for the Association of WSD's birthday, the Gold Challenge. It is about A4 size and is double cloth with 12 pockets, each pocket holding an example of textile treatment. There are knitting needles and a ball of wool, some tapestry, dyed fibre , a weaving, all in dolls house proportion. Chris Fletcher and Linda Scurr did all of these. All I did was the double cloth and tucking the miniatures in each pocket. Fine silk (60/2 NM) was used for the front cloth and 2/6 cotton for the back.














If I did a similar straight double cloth and put a tile in each pocket, I don't believe the weaving would stand the weight. So suppose I make it a chequerboard with a tile in every alternate pocket and use (say) a 30/2 silk as the front cloth over the tiles but have three cloths and bring one to the front in the non-tile squares. If I used warp and weft interchange, the cloth would be really strong. So I would have

Cloth A 30/2 silk set at about 20 to the inch - this will need experiment.
Cloth B 2/10 cotton
Cloth C 2/10 cotton.

The cloths go, in order from the front, Cloth A, Cloth B and Cloth C  under a tile
In the other squares, they go Cloth C, Cloth A and B

That should make it a stout cloth and secure the silk threads.

In addition, I could warp up in stripes of colour in Cloth C and have something like a colour gamp in the non-tile squares.  Or how about painting that warp on the loom? I don't know if cotton will take my SEKA silk paints. Cloth B would be white to show off the tiles - or black?
Experimentation is called. I only have a limited number of tiles so the first experiment will have to use squares of card. And can I get away with doing this on the 8-shaft Louet Kombo or do I need more shafts? I can't see why I need more than 6 shafts if each cloth is tabby.

I am still weaving the Vale of Evesham (up to number 4) on the Megado. Linda Scurr has suggested that I need some unripe plums among the leaves on Side 3, Summer. Thank you Linda. I will implement that idea. It has to be done this week.

I had thought I could not develop the Annuals any further but two versions have been staring at me in the sitting room. I do not like the Autumn side with falling petals so am going to replace it with a design of seedheads. To which end I went to the Autumn Quilt Show to get some more colours of machine embroidery thread. Pretty much a washout. The Spring one is twice as big and has people like ArtVanGo and Ario not to mention a fantastic stall selling Japanese fabrics. Nothing like that last week, and no nice glossy thread. Quilters apparently use only cotton. Bah!

Artistic Decision Time (3)

Progress is being made. Every time I sit down at the Megado, I think 'This is it - the final version'. But it is not. Here is Vale3, as off the loom with Winter at the left and  Autumn at the right. There are faults in Autumn which are due to the shuttle I happen to be using for purple. The said shuttle has rollers and a low nose and, as my beloved Bluster Bay shuttles do not give this problem (they never give any problem except that other weavers keep wanting to borrow them 'Just to try out, you understand'), the roller shuttle has been abandoned. Also there are a few errors in the draft in Autumn too and Winter is too long.

The machine embroidery of leaves for Summer has worked

and the flowers for Spring look sufficiently Spring-like.

Here are Summer and Autumn.

So I am off to correct the draft of Autumn and then start on Vale4.

Artistic Decision Time

In addition to my attempts at Annuals with double stitched cloth, I have been working on a similar theme but devoted to the Vale of Evesham. We live on the edge of the Vale which is a famous fruit growing district, particularly for plums. This is because the River Severn has been bringing down silt for millenia and dumping it in the Vale, so the soil is very rich.

What I have done is to imagine fruit trees throughout the year.

Side 1 Winter - three cordon fruit trees in the snow. Well, the snow is very grubby round here.

This is acceptable. I'll stick with this.

Side 2. Spring. The cordons are in flower but only the cordon framework is being woven. There are two versions shown here. The upper one has  a black weft on a warp painted green and brown, all a bit dark and not spring like. The lower one is on a white warp. The trunks are in mid-brown now and the branches are various colours of brown/green. The variation of colour was done to see which colour would be best but I like the effect of the variation so I will stick with this.

And this is with the flowers laid out on top. I still think the flowers are too big. They have a diameter of an inch and the width of the cloth is only 5.25 inches. I will wait until after my lesson next week to decide on this. But it does not stop me weaving the next version since, whatever happens, the flowers are being applied after weaving. The flowers shown were cut from a ribbon which I dyed various shades of pink. I was a bit surprised that the ribbon dyed so well with acid dyes. I have no idea what the material of the ribbon is and thought it would be viscose so was expecting the colour take-up to be poor. As I wanted a pale pink, I didn't mind. Instead the first batch gave me a good bright red! And the lace ribbon, used in Annuals, has never turned out remotely pink but is dark red. No use for plum blossom. And yes I do know that plum blossom has five petals not six

Side 3 Summer with leaves everywhere. This shows two versions, both with brown trunks. One has three cordons and one was only one cordon which is a mistake. To me, it looks like nothing at all. So three cordons it is.

Side 4 Autumn. Three cordons carrying lots of plums - Early Orleans by the colour. You do not ask for plums in the green grocers around here, you ask for 'Pershore Eggs', or 'Marjorie Seedlings' or 'Early Orleans' or  - - -. What you do not ask for is Victorias as they are considered an inferior variety suited only for export to the rest of the world. Or possibly fed to the pigs.


Well, that is a few artistic decisions taken. Now I have to get the dimensions right. The Annuals series  had a 'frame' of brown broken twill which was lined up with the edges of the box. Here I do not mind if branches break through from one side to the next. But currently the length is 22 inches and it needs to  be 20 inches plus 3/8th of an inch. So the drafts need adjusting.

For the record, it takes me 2.5 hours total weaving time  to weave a complete set of four sides plus the run-in for the seam.

ANNUALS 1 to N

In 2008, the Association of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers held its Biennial Exhibition and one of the classes was 'an item which fits in a CD case and is inspired by a song'. The next three months were spent driving round the UK, muttering 'What a stupid idea' and trying to fit something in the way of weaving to an (any) opera aria. Until one day - I suddenly saw how to fit to 'I'm Gonna to Wash that Man right outta my Hair'. See the South Pacific series for what happened over the next few months. I ended up by entering 6 different items in CD cases.  They were all exhibited at our recent Guild Exhibition and admired by a Mayor. The private view was full of chains of office and I never worked out who was which town.

My favourite is 'You have to be properly Taught' which is a startling anti-racist song given when South Pacific was written. In the weaving, each pillar of colour is a different race and the pink/grey dominates all the rest.


 The warp was often painted (SEKA silk paints) on the loom with two different colours, one for each cloth and cloth interchange was used. The weft was often space dyed.
 
The basis of the weaving was a stitched double cloth in 60/2 silk which means 90 ends to the inch. The back cloth is a twill on Shafts 1 to 4 and the front cloth is a point twill on Shafts 5 to 32. Have I said this was on my 32 shaft Megado? I have been thinking about this for the last year and decided to try again (only more ambitious). In 2008, each piece fitted into a CD case, so it was a single 'picture'.  This time I wanted to weave four different pictures together, turn the cloth on its side, sew the ends together and slide the loop of weaving over a 5 inch square Perspex box. The warp is now horizontal. At one time, I thought of weaving four separate pictures and sewing them up each edge so that the warp was vertical but decided that it would be too untidy.

It all turned out to be much more difficult than last year's ideas. Firstly I have to get all four sides right in the same piece of weaving and secondly having the warp horizontal is quite restricting. Thirdly the shapes were done in 3 and 1 twill while the background was in 1 and 3 twill to start with. The colour contrast was poor (3 to 1) and so there was a lot of experimenting with colour. Also, while the twill background was okay in the South Pacific series, it dominated in Annuals so I changed it to a broken twill. It is VERY much more difficult to see an error in a broken twill background in the draft but any error sticks out when it is woven. I work with Fibreworks and, for these weavings use a liftplan which is extensively edited.

The first series is 'Annuals'. Side 1 is Seeds (black weft) on the ground (warp painted in swirls of different browns. This is for winter. There were various experiments with colour but this turned out best. I 'framed' the pictures by putting a strip 10 mm wide of brown broken twill between each side.

Michael painted the inside of the box top with several coats of black acrylic paints  for me and then glued the box to its base. 

The second side is Seedlings, green weft on a warp painted with swirls of green. Apart from experimenting with different shades of green, there were no problems here.

The problems started with trying to weave the third side, Flowers. I tried all sorts of colours including some spaced weft I dyed myself. That came out as very pronounced stripes. I also tried some silk thread from Oliver Twist. That was too thick and also too stripey.  In the end, some dark red and brilliant purple Shantung silk from Fibrecrafts was best. But still a dull picture. What I wanted was lots of flowers of different sizes, colours and types.

I investigated various additional techniques which are shown here. On the left are the striped dyed wefts, then to right, the woven flowers are purple. On top, there is machine embroidery, collaged blue cotton flowers plus embroidery and some pink flowers put on with paint on a toothbrush through a stencil cut in stiff card.  The collaged flowers were best but I could not make a good job of them at a smaller size - I thought these were too big. The width of the warp is only 5.25 inches and these blue flowers are an inch across. The machine embroidery was quite good but I am not an expert at this and it was all a bit uncontrolled. I am going to a private class on machine embroidery next week so I might go back to this. 

Another option was to interlace leaves and flowers and then stencil pink flowers on top. I applied gold paint as well. The pink painted flowers are less than an inch across and are not strong enough.

 
The best so far has been to dye some lace ribbon, cut it up and sew the flowers on by hand. There are two sorts of lace flowers here.

And now for the last side which is Petals and consist of a weaving of broken flowers and petals. This is painted with pink and gold and is not bad.

This one has dyed ribbon flowers cut up and sewn on and some lace flowers which are dyed a brown/red.

Not sure about this. We now have two versions put where I see them a lot and I am thinking about it. I have put on a 20 m white silk warp using my AVL warping wheel and a sectional warp beam and have used about less than 8 metres so far. So there is plenty left for more experiments.

There is another series called ' The Vale of Evesham' which is coming on really well and I am much more pleased with that. But more of that series another time.